The invention relates to various tools and techniques to facilitate economical manufacture of cabinets without elaborate, expensive jigging setups.
Economical manufacture of cabinets, such as typical cabinets for residential and business applications, requires extensive use of "mass production" techniques. Large, expensive "jig" setups and dedicated tools must be used to perform tasks including accurate alignment and drilling of construction holes for vertical and horizontal cabinet parts. The construction holes include those for edges of cabinet doors and cabinet housings for hinges, latches, handles, and knobs, drilling of precisely located holes in edges of various panels used in construction of a cabinet for receiving glue and construction dowels, shelf pins, and the like, and drilling of holes in drawer boxes for attachment of drawer front panels thereto, and alignment and drilling of threaded inserts in the back surfaces of drawer front panels. While large volume cabinet manufacturers can amortize the high cost of such jig setups and the factory floor space required therefor over a large number of cabinets, most small cabinet shops that specialize in custom or semi-custom cabinet manufacture cannot provide permanent jig setups. Instead, smaller shops must orient their manufacturing activities toward relatively small lots. Consequently, frequent jig setups and repetitive measurement of location of construction holes, shelf pin holes, etc. are necessary. Such frequent setups and repetitive measurements are very time consuming and therefore costly. Furthermore, the likelihood of costly errors and consequent discarding of partially constructed units and material is greatly increased.
There is a presently unmet need for a group of alignment tools and techniques for drilling the above mentioned construction holes for assembly of cabinets to enable a relatively small cabinet shop to be able to avoid the need for frequent complex, costly jig setups and repetitive, time consuming measurements for alignment of construction holes in the manufacture of cabinets.